Better, faster, stronger: Scaling technical services to vendors
The world has changed. In 2022, you can change, too. Scale faster, scale wider with a white label delivery partner (a partner). Why work with a global technology services partner? When a construction firm takes on a contract to build a house, it takes a lot of different types of skills to see the project to completion. No one expects the roofers to also put in the electrics or for the plumber to do the brickwork. But it’s somehow become commonplace to expect this type of approach from software vendors. Not only must the company develop the product, but they must integrate it with end customer systems, provide customized training, and send subject matter experts to consult with whatever industry is making use of the software at the moment. There’s a better approach—one that keeps developers developing and that, like a general contractor with a bunch of homes planned, works in partnership with experts to get more jobs done more quickly. You can scale your software business faster, and scale it wider by working with a global technology services partner. You can scale with Pegasus. What do we offer as a service provider? So what exactly is Pegasus’ offering? We deliver your digital solutions to your customers on your behalf under your branding or ours. We work all over the world, speak the local language of the customers, and are engineers at heart who work with technologies very similar to yours. We specialize in full stack engineering, with the aim to be able to provide all of these services as a single delivery partner: ● Residency services● Technical training● Software development● Field engineering With global travel restrictions constantly changing, being able to send a team to a distant client office for in-person training or resident expertise isn’t the given it once was. Vendors have been doing a lot to respond to the changes, offering remote alternatives to just about everything. But the fact is, end customers have high demands, and as software becomes ever more integral to business success, the demand list grows. Everything has to be done bespoke in the customer’s way. No matter how complex the project, or even how unpredictable the project path is, Pegasus is prepared to respond. We’re already stationed all over the world, which makes attending client sites much more realistic, even in uncertain times. From our side, it’s tactical, so that you can focus on the overarching strategy of both the project and your business. There are cost benefits as well as sales and delivery benefits. Overhead increases in recruiting your own staff to cover short-term requirements quickly become costly, for one thing. Probably the most point to partnership, however, is customer satisfaction. Customers who feel well looked after, who think they’re your top priority, and who are catered to on a personal level are repeated customers. And they recommend products and services to other users. The technologies we work with Within our four specialisms, we have multiple technologies that we consider our areas of expertise. As a company, we have been delivering these for nearly 20 years, but collectively our leadership has been in the game for decades, with a full facility to deliver in many different technologies. ● Automation, monitoring, APM● Containers Orchestration & Microservices● Data management & storage, backup software, SDStorage, storage● Network monitoring, SD-WAN, SDN, network automation, networking● Data center networking, server monitoring, network visibility & traffic control, network orchestration● Security orchestrators, infrastructure security, endpoint security● UC & Collaboration)● Databases What’s new in 2022? So needless to say, the pandemic has undone business as usual in the software vendor industry. So, this year, we aren’t just partnering in service delivery, as usual. We’re adding value the best way we know how—by sharing intelligence and expertise with the vendor community. We have an entire year’s program of knowledge-sharing activities planned, from informational emails to fresh blog posts and even interactive webinars. Everything we’re doing is geared towards bringing the sector back together after two long years of people drifting apart. Pegasus is here for you and for your customers. So keep a lookout for details about our next event, a webinar for HR leaders to support successful recruiting processes. Getting team dynamics right starts from the moment you start thinking about advertising a job. Follow us on LinkedIn and get all the latest information and exclusive insights from a global technology service provider. If you’re ready to scale faster and scale wider through a service delivery partnership, let’s have a talk.
How partnering can enrich your end service results
Partnering certain skills through strategic partnership can prevent diversion of resources—time, money and people—toward building a skillset that has a limited return, especially in software development. Knowledge sharing within a company is a communication and training matter. Not all knowledge and skills are permanently required. Partnering with a company to deliver subject matter specialisms and technical skills means you can still give your clients a high level of expertise, and you can do so rapidly, even instantly. Anteing Up At Pegasus, we live by our company values. Our focus is and always has been on: – Integrity– Innovation– People– Dependability, and– Partnership That means that we strive to support our most important resource—our people—by creating an environment that is creative, open, collaborative, and trusting. And that includes how we work with our external partners and clients. What’s at stake? Although we directly consult on a wide range of tech solutions, Pegasus has a particular partnership specialism with software vendors to extend their delivery of client services. This is how it works. You have a crack team of developers, some fantastic applications, and customers who are interested or ready to implement them. Perhaps, however, you don’t have some or all of the following: – A big enough team to deploy to many clients at once– The ability to travel on-site to distant clients– Client support in local customer languages– Knowledge of regional business customs for global clients– Training capabilities We tap our teams to deliver these types of services—and many more—on your behalf, no matter where we’re needed. We have hubs around the world staffed by multi-lingual tech experts, highly-skilled developers, software trainers, and field engineers who know how things work in every area. It’s even possible that your team requires a subject matter expert on-site to assist with a particular project. If your client is in a niche industry, then ensuring that your application is going to integrate with their systems and meet their needs will require someone on your side who gets it. Pegasus can provide that, too. We have first-hand experience in many high-growth industries, as well as several smaller ones. So by partnering these services with a company like Pegasus, you are gaining that experience onto your team for the duration of your project. The house wins But it’s not just about Pegasus. Partnering with a trusted partner, and trusted partner to take care of boots-on-the-ground services is proven to free up in-house resources. That means you can focus on strategic moves like product development, long-term business planning, market moves, and even capital investment. When we say “resources”, we are talking about all resources. Your people will be free to focus on what they do best, whether that’s actual coding or marketing, or closing the deal. But it also means money. You won’t be sinking funds into overheads for staff you don’t need or skills that get used once or twice, never to be needed again. Instead that savings can be allocated towards training that matters to all of your clients—certifying your developers, for instance—or hiring staff with skills you do need—a specialist project manager, perhaps. All in Part of how the savings work is that partnering is scalable. Project A needs 10 people, but Project B needs 18 people. Project C, which overlaps B, is going to need 12. Next year, Project D only needs 3. If you were having to work with your own staff, this would be a nightmare. By the time you’d finished recruiting for A, B, and C, you’d have to start laying people off before D. Your HR department would have to be big, which would itself be an overhead drain. By partnering, you get as many people as you need on the job when you need them, where you need them. A good partner will be an extension of your brand. Therefore they have to ensure that they have not only their own clear standards but will also uphold all your values. What the partnership brings to the table varies from one company to another. What Pegasus brings is: – Range of industry experience– Global connections and regional knowledge– Technical expertise– Scalability of services Your ace in the hole The services we provide on your behalf let you focus on software development and deployment for your clients. And it also allows you the chance to take strategic stock of your own company’s direction. Leave the practical to Pegasus – Subject expert residencies– Software development and integration– Local language field engineering– Team training We’d love to talk with you more about how partnering up could work. Contact us for a chat.
How to speak the same language with your clients?
Forging a strong human connection is key to good customer support and long-term client retention. Partnering with Pegasus can help. Partnering up for real connection Forging a strong human connection is key to good customer support and long-term client retention. Partnering with Pegasus can help. If the covid pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that humans really value face-to-face communication. When it’s taken away, we find ourselves struggling a bit to make sense of just about everything. For businesses that have pivoted to remote delivery and support, such as software vendors, this causes something of a conundrum. On the one hand, now more than ever, people are craving connection. On the other, there are a lot of very good reasons to limit travel to client sites now and in the future. In fact, even before covid, decreasing business travel for environmental concerns was already factoring into many companies’ social responsibilities. Mass uptake of remote working during the pandemic made it clear just how much of an impact work travel has on the environment. But when it comes to technical deployments, there are some aspects that are just done best in person. Client training, field engineering, and even the research and discovery phase are all usually best performed on-site. Even when those clients are in different regions of the world. There’s a way to do that without ● Travelling unnecessarily● Adding more people to your payroll, or● Upskilling staff with one-time-use, regional knowledge. Share the work Partnering with technical services centers of excellence (CoE), like Pegasus allows vendors to provide a personal, up-close service to distant clients. Pegasus is already there. We have regional hubs across the world, strategically situated to deliver partner services into emerging and other fast-growing digital markets. Our physical presence in these areas means we can be there on your behalf. A CoE allows you to trust that your own post-sales services can be delivered to a top standard while leveraging proximity to clients as well as local knowledge. We can provide you with premium expertise in direct customer support, from project consulting to development to troubleshooting: ● Field engineering● Development & integration● System and technical training● Residency programs● And more… Add skills without overheads But Pegasus is more than just boots on the ground. Yes, we are present in places you may not be able to go right now, which is handy given the state of world travel. But when the world opens back up, will you be ready to conduct business in other global regions? Do you have regional knowledge, and an understanding of business customs? Do you have staff who speak the local language? If not, you may be missing out on more than you realize. We all know that poor customer service loses us, clients. But even good customer service that the client can’t understand is going to be a problem. Speaking the client’s native language makes a substantial difference in customer retention. And that’s for both in-person and remote customer support. Fully 29% of software vendors have lost customers just because of language barriers. On the flip side, 70% of clients report feeling loyalty to technology brands that do provide multilingual support in their language. So there’s a big incentive to figure out how to talk to your clients in their own language. Get everyone to speak the same language When you’ve got a product-like software that is deployed truly globally, attempting to hire staff who can keep pace with every market is going to be tricky. One week you may have a product deployment in Turkey, the next week, Nigeria, and a month later, Argentina. Instead of expecting your clients to deal with the language your staff work in, you can partner with a technical CoE that speaks the language. Pegasus’s team members are multilingual and multi-talented. We pool expertise in software development and integration, tech strategy, corporate training, and field engineering to deliver top-quality vendor services for our partners on-site and remotely, white-labeled or branded, speaking both the client’s literal language and their business language. You can create those personal connections everywhere your technology is used. At a time when “remote” is the big buzzword, you can get close without compromising social responsibility. And through partnerships with Pegasus CoE you can do it without adding operational complexity, headcount, or other overheads to your balance sheet. Want to talk more about how to partner with Pegasus? Get in touch here: Contact Pegasus!
APIs are more important than ever
APIs aren’t just for connecting clients with services. In 2021, they’re for building bridges between business teams, too. Businesses are like families. The happy ones are all alike: efficient, communicative, and operationally lean. The ones facing challenges are all facing different challenges for different reasons. For that reason, every path to ‘happiness’—to efficiency, good communications, and operational leanness—must be customized to that company’s own challenges. Sometimes, as long as the job is getting done, we believe a system works. But drilling down to the granularity of who does what on the ‘shop floor’ reveals that there is a lot of reprocessing of data or inputting one report into another to create yet another report in order to get the data that a company actually needs. What Pegasus does is holistic. We look at the entire business flow. How do departments and divisions work with each other, and how do they use their IT function to communicate? These are high-level questions that require drill down into those granular processes. Pegasus specializes in analyzing the entire business function, from the factory floor to the boardroom to get a full picture of a company’s digital usage. We then create a plan to integrate your key applications (modern and legacy) leveraging a combination of APIs and our orchestration software to refine the process of automating your business. APIs work by giving more direct access to data (with necessary security in place, of course). Instead of needing separate platforms to access each database, an API lets a user send a request for information directly to a database from their interface. This saves time, and human and financial resources by eliminating redundant efforts. Most importantly, it helps provide new insight and faster results from the data you already generate. That perhaps sounds a bit up in the sky somewhere, so let’s look at a practical way Pegasus puts APIs to work. Pegasus and API Manufacturing, for example, is already generally a high-tech industry. Everything from product design and spec, to mass production, sales, and shipping is done using IT. But often those tech spaces remain segregated from one another within the same business. An R&D department has its own software, a factory site has theirs, and the sales team and logistics have theirs. Each division does a great job with what they’ve got, but getting information from one to another often requires a surprisingly slow, low-tech approach. Imagine a new gadget is designed in R&D and is ready to be offered for sale. The design software isn’t equipped to take orders. The product information has to be relayed to the sales team, who then input it manually into their own product database, which is connected to the enterprise management system (EMS). This lets them show it online and allows for some marketing automation, but it is still fundamentally reprocessing the data from R&D. They sell 100,000 units. The sales team then has to send the order info to the factory. Perhaps there is a shared file, such as an Excel sheet, where orders are keyed in and saved. A shared file on the server requires that no one accidentally overwrites or deletes anyone else’s data. Version control is a major issue. The factory fulfills the orders and liaises with logistics by email and hopes nothing gets overlooked. Finally, the logistics team uses a combination of tablet apps and paper to track deliveries. This data is then reprocessed by an admin team for invoicing. Each step along the way is using technology within their own operation. But at every junction where two divisions meet, there is a break in the technology, like a river cutting across a path, where the information has to get into a boat to be rowed across before it can carry on its journey. APIs act as bridges across those rivers, allowing the data to continue on its way without having to change vehicles to get to the other side. So R&D would design a product, and an API would allow their software to populate the sales database with the product spec. Sales can then upload it to the website, where a customer would place an order, and their order would be sent automatically to a cloud database viewable by sales, finance, the factory, and logistics. Thus, everyone can prepare space in their schedule for it in advance. This data immediately feeds into the sales reports. As soon as the order is fulfilled by the factory, factory staff can tick a box on their own software, which notifies logistics. When the logistics team receives the order, an email or text message automatically sends the customer tracking information, and action on the logistics mobile app upon delivery tells finance the job’s done. In this case, everyone gets to keep the software they had before—their legacy applications—which do the job just fine. But the APIs let these applications speak directly to each other. This imaginary manufacturing company has an enterprise resource planning program already in place. They have an EMS and marketing automation to chase leads. They have a clear workflow. But they still had a lot of space for bespoke IT architecture to support a leaner operation. The fact is, in 2022, customers have come to expect API development, whether they realize it or not. We all interact with APIs constantly through our internet use on computers, mobiles, and tablets. We expect instant information about when to expect the things we have ordered, and we want to be able to see what’s happening at every stage. Why should we expect any difference from inside our own businesses? Each department needs that operational visibility in order to do its own job efficiently. Pegasus gives you both oversight and insight. Want to talk more about how our integration services can make your company a happy one? Contact us here.
Application Integration: Everything you need to know
The proliferation of technologies like Big Data, cloud computing, and IoT, and trends like diverse workflow solutions are some key reasons behind its massive growth. To help you understand this technology more comprehensively, we have discussed all its significant aspects.